Many of you who grew up in Denver are nodding. For the rest of you, I’ll explain.

Hutchinson Homes built houses here in the Metro Denver area from the 1950’s until the early ‘80’s. They built a lot of houses. If you’ve spent any time in Denver at all, you’ve seen a Hutchinson. They all look alike. Two bedroom windows, front door, picture window, garage. Mostly brick. Garage may be one or two car. Kind of like this:

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Or this:

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Or this:

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Wherever you see blocks and blocks of essentially identical houses like this, you’re in a Hutchinson neighborhood. Some of the houses will have two car garages, some will only have single car. Some have the garage on the left, some on the right. Occasionally you’ll see one with no garage at all, or with only one bedroom window in the front. But mostly they look a lot like 85 Cody Street, where I grew up.

In the 1970’s they branched out and built some trendy bi-levels and tri-levels. But throughout the ‘50’s and ‘60’s they built these little brick forts. A lot of them.

And they were forts. They were small. They were simple. But they were built incredibly well -- built to last. And they have.

One of my buyers recently bought a Hutchinson. I was having a lot of fun when we were shopping, because walking into a Hutchinson reminds me of my childhood. The one he bought reminded me of my friend Lisa who lived down the street. We played Barbies in her basement a lot.

The inspector I generally work with is wonderful. Most thorough inspector I’ve ever seen. If there’s a problem in a house, he finds it. Takes three to four hours on the average inspection. He grew up in a Hutchinson, too. Inspecting this Hutchinson for my buyer, he kept walking around saying “This is a joy.” Not just because it reminded him of his childhood, but because the house – which was built in 1961 – was in such amazingly good shape.

We wound up asking the sellers for no repairs. Zip. Zilch. Nada.

Of course, not every Hutchinson is in such pristine condition. This one has had the same owners since 1975, and they’ve taken very good care of it. But even a Hutchinson in rough condition is, at its core, a well-built house.

My parents owned their Hutchinson for 40 years. It was small. (1100 square feet and six people – you do the math.) It didn’t have a lot of closet space. But it was sturdy. It sat on a big lot. And by the time my parents sold it, it had been very personalized. They finished the full basement in 1968, doubling their finished square footage. In the ‘70’s they added a beautiful family room to the back of the house. Later they tore up the carpet and refinished the beautiful hardwood floors underneath. Every pre-1970’s Hutchinson has gorgeous #1 red oak hardwood floors, often buried beneath dated shag carpeting. It cleans up nicely!

That house was lovely – and sold very quickly – when my parents finally moved out in 2004.

Mary Beth Loves Denver

The local scoop from Mary Beth Bonacci

Well, there is good news and bad news in this crazy Denver real estate market.

The good news is that, in July, inventory increased by just over 4%. The bad news is that, even with that increase, July inventory still set a record low, with only 7352 total properties on the market.

That is not a lot of houses.

What does this mean? It means there are a lot more buyers than there are homes to sell them. And so, especially in the lower price points, good listings get multiple offers, one winner, and several disappointed “losers.”

Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, and wonderful 2017! I hope you all had wonderful holidays, and that the return to “ordinary time” hasn’t been too traumatic.

My holidays were wonderful. Nice time with family, a fun New Year’s Eve party in San Francisco, and then of course the obligatory week laid out with the nasty post-holiday bug that seems to have felled so many this season.

But the little “holiday” story I want to tell today happened during the holidays, but it wasn’t particularly festive. In fact, it could have ruined a lot of people’s entire season.

I bought my house on Friday. Again. I have owned it for eleven years this month. And I have refinanced, by my count, five times.

Why? Because I want to pay it off. I want to be that cash buyer who goes to the head of the multiple bids. I want to bypass that mortgage payment every month, and write a nice check to some deserving charity instead.

If you are one of my Facebook friends, you saw a stream of prayer request posts from me last month. I had clients who were in a very complicated situation. I didn’t go into detail on Facebook, and I won’t here, but basically title issues were threatening to cause them to lose their house to foreclosure before we could close it with our buyers. The situation consumed me for well over a month. I literally spent every day looking for new solutions — and pushing forward with the multiple potential solutions we were working on. Which we eventually did — at the 11th hour— thanks to a whole lot of work, a lot of thinking outside the box, and more than a few prayers.

So imagine my displeasure when, a few weeks later, I heard a radio commercial for a “discount” real estate company that said “Most houses sell within a couple of days. Why pay an agent 6% for just a few days work?”

Somewhere in Las Vegas tonight, there is a stage with a trophy with my name on it, that I am not there to claim.

After 11 years in the business, I am being inducted into the RE/MAX Hall of Fame. It’s one of those achievement awards that RE/MAX agents work a lifetime to attain. I hadn’t been tracking my production closely, and I honestly thought I was a good two years away from achieving it. But the lovely people at RE/MAX International surprised me with the news last month.

And of course I’m sharing the news with you, because I’m excited about it. And because it’s what we agents are supposed to do.

So here I am at 35,000 feet, watching a People's Court marathon on my iPad. Things have sure changed from the days of my full-time travel. Back in my day, we had nothing but bad food and in-flight magazines to keep us occupied. But now, thanks to the miracles of modern internet technology, I can watch a parade of disaffected roommates and former lovers hash out their differences on national television.

The last case caught my attention, though -- enough to motivate me to turn off the streaming and start writing.

It was the case of a young couple who were new homeowners. After they bought the house, they discovered that the fireplace was in dangerous condition and needed extensive work. The couple were irate. The sellers had told them the fireplace was fine. And instead it was very not-fine. They had children -- children -- living in a house with a dangerous fireplace. Someone had to pay.